While Top Gun: Maverick is a massive box-office hit, the Top Gun sequel’s outsized success could spell an end to the 80s nostalgia that has dominated multiplexes and TV screens for the last decade. For a while, it seemed as if Top Gun’s sequel would never be able to live up to expectations. After all, Top Gun: Maverick took a staggering 36 years to complete.
This meant that, for the Top Gun sequel to succeed, Top Gun: Maverick would need to win over existing fans and a larger contingent of viewers who weren’t even born when the original movie was released in 1986. Despite how unlikely this seemed, Top Gun: Maverick’s box office success ended up exceeding even the most optimistic expectations for the sequel.
Top Gun: Maverick became bigger than the original movie, the biggest movie in star Tom Cruise’s career, and one of the biggest sequels in cinema history as the Top Gun follow-up broke record after record. This just provided more proof, as if it were necessary, that 80s nostalgia is a profitable trend.
However, while Top Gun: Maverick is now among the biggest movies ever made, it seems inevitable that the 80s nostalgia trend will eventually to peak, and with its peak will come an unavoidable decline. While the existence of a prequel to Stephen King’s It proves that studios and producers are still willing to bet big bucks on nostalgia, the fact that the series is set in the 60s rather than the 80s could be indicative of a larger movement. Top Gun: Maverick’s massive haul could spell an end for 80s nostalgia as a trend given that Top Gun was one of the few remaining large properties from the decade that had never been rebooted, revisited, or otherwise re-imagined in the intervening years.
Top Gun 2’s Historic Box Office Explained
Not too long ago, fans of Tom Cruise were speculating about whether Top Gun: Maverick would be the first of the actor’s movies to cross the one billion mark at the box office. Before that, articles were (seemingly reasonably) suggesting that Top Gun: Maverick couldn’t replicate Top Gun’s original box office haul, as this would require a take of over $900 million in 2022 dollars. As of September 2022, Top Gun: Maverick has left both of these now-quaint estimates in its rearview mirror as the sequel soars toward a historic $1.45 billion box office haul. While this seemingly proves that there is an endless, insatiable appetite for more 80s blockbusters sequels and reboots, this may not be the case when box office trends are analyzed more carefully.
Why 80s Nostalgia Is Running Out
After four seasons of Stranger Things and the release of a reboot for almost every conceivable 80s franchise, there are few fresh takes on the movies and shows of the decade left. By this stage, viewers have seen Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Tron, Evil Dead, 21 Jump Street, Robocop, and countless other 80s revivals hit cinemas, while between the 2016 reboot and the more nostalgic Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the Ghostbusters franchise has gone through not one, but two different reboots in the last six years. There is a limited supply of iconic pop culture intellectual properties for studios to plunder, as evidenced by the diminishing returns found when 21 Jump Street’s critical success led to lesser reboots of Chips and Baywatch.
How Top Gun 2 Tapped Into 80s Nostalgia
Top Gun: Maverick’s success seems to prove that there is still a big appetite for 80s nostalgia, but the movie has one thing going for it that many reboots and belated follow-ups are missing. As a direct sequel to a movie that was always a character study at heart, Top Gun: Maverick didn’t just bring back a beloved franchise. More importantly, the Top Gun sequel also showed viewers what the hero had been up to since the original movie and, in doing so, deconstructed the happy ending of the cheery 80s hit. While Top Gun: Maverick director Jospeh Kosinski’s earlier flop Tron 2.0 technically attempted to pull this off too, that effort was a lot less successful because Tron 2.0’s dark twist made the original hero its villain. In the case of Top Gun: Maverick, the approach worked a lot better because Maverick was never a cut-and-dried hero and the sequel made him more complicated, rather than simply turning him into an antagonist.